- What the hell was I thinking? ‘Write a book?’ My game-plan being, what, that it will then ‘be in shops?’ and people will ‘read it’? INSANE.

- Why doesn’t anyone tell you about ‘the bit between when you’ve finished writing it and when it comes out?!’
- I thought that would be the calm bit! It’s the opposite of the calm bit! It’s a period of time in which everything can go wrong in your mind an infinite amount of times!
- Is it too late to take the books back from the shops? What if I want to change one of the sentences?!

- What am I supposed to do with gallons of excess nervous energy and literally no idea where to channel it?
- Wander up and down streets with a megaphone shouting “Do you like books? You could buy mine if you like, haha!” at strangers?
- Terrible idea. Where would I even get a megaphone?
- Get a grip, it’s 2026, shouldn’t I be, you know, making video content?
- Counterpoint: I don’t have any idea how to make video content!
- Oh just shut up and make some video content, it can’t possibly be that hard.
- Why have I just spent what felt like one full actual month editing a single piece of ‘video content’?

- Why didn’t I just buy some Bitcoin when I was reading loads about it in 2013 whilst researching it for a feature which I also then didn’t go on to write?
- Why don’t I drop out of society and become a hermit?
- Why don’t I get an actual real job?
- OK, this is getting ridiculous. Back to serious suggestions.
- But where would I even get a megaphone?

- Perhaps I should be on BookTok?
- What am I talking about? And also what does that even mean, ‘be on’? Watch it? Participate in it? Make videos for it? What even is it? Anyway.
- Also, crucially, I hate/am too old for/am terrified of TikTok.
- Surely at this point, it’s safer just not to know?
- And remember how painful ‘making the video content’ was! Glaciers melted, you developed a nosebleed, your phone spontaneously combusted, it’s simply not worth it.

- I know – I’ll compare my book against every other book that is being published in the world right now!
- I know – I’ll compare my book to every other book that’s ever been written by any author, alive or dead!
- I know – I’ll compare my book to every other achievement in human history!

- Urgh, what if there’s a chapter that everyone forgot to proof read and during the writing of that specific chapter I accidentally used that oddly expressive gurning-face emoji instead of question marks all the way through🥴🥴! 🥴!

- I should definitely post something on Substack. THAT’S HOW YOU PROVE THAT YOU’RE A WRITER NOW.
- But also, why the hell didn’t I start a Substack a full year ago?
- Well obviously I did, except I didn’t, I signed up for a Substack, and then spent months agonising about some sort of theme or concept whatever, when obviously I should have just started banging out posts and working out what it’s actually about later.
- Is there time to write a year’s worth of posts in one night and then back-date them all so that if people stumble onto my Substack it looks like I’ve been jauntily pumping out content and haven’t just panic-posted one incomprehensible torrent of gibberish?

- What if absolutely no-one buys the book.
- What if loads of people buy the book but LITERALLY ALL OF THEM HATE IT.
- What if, at the book launch, I accidentally choke midway through the speech and tip a full glass of red wine onto my crotch and tumble over the side of the stairwell where the speeches are made and crash onto the display with all my books and knock over a lit candle which is there for some reason and BURN DOWN THE ENTIRE BOOKSHOP and appear in the papers under the headline ‘Failure To Launch’ and every other remaining copy of my book is pulped as a result of some sort of ancient medieval law about the necessity of destroying books which are, ultimately, clearly cursed?

Or.

I mean…

Or……

Possibly… it might all be……….

OK?

YEAH BUT ON THE OTHER HAND--

Max Olesker’s debut book, Making The Cut: An Unorthodox Love Story, is published on 05.02.26 by Penguin/Ebury, and available to buy right now. He’s dealing with the whole thing really well.

It got me thinking about a place I wrote about which was - at the time, at least - the absolute antithesis of Norman’s. E Pellicci is a raucous and brilliant family run café - and piece of living history - in Bethnal Green Road, and I spent weeks, if not months, embedded in various corners interviewing the Pellicci family and the regulars.

Having stumbled upon it by total chance, when living just down the road, I became fascinated by the place - which seemed to effortlessly melt away the monastic walls of self-containment that Londoners normally construct around themselves when out in public, and to happily bundle strangers together with an atmosphere that was somewhere between a children’s birthday party and a pub lock-in.

At the time, it seemed important to document the vibrancy of the place - it had no real website, no digital footprint, and other than during its limited opening hours (closing at around 3.30pm Mondays - Saturdays, closed on Sundays, and closed for - spectacularly - the entirety of August, when the entire family went back to Italy) there was little way of proving that the café wasn’t some sort of fever dream. So I wrote about it because I’d thought - or worried, perhaps - that it might be on its way out.

Anyway, I was obviously completely and spectacularly wrong - these days the café runs thriving Instagram and TikTok accounts, has a BigCartel page selling branded t-shirts, and has launched its own podcast, meaning that perhaps it too has become subsumed into the Norman-verse (developments which somehow feel both positive and faintly depressing in equal measure - but then, why shouldn’t the café do all the things that every other company, and indeed individual, in the world seems to be doing? Though should they ever decide to launch ‘E Pellicci: Dubai’ I reserve the right to feel truly empty ).

All of which is to say - it’s entirely possible you know all about Anna and Nev’s caff. But for those who haven’t had the pleasure of an E Pellicci experience - this is a little taste of what it’s like…

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'You Can’t Get Nothing Like This No More’: How London's Oldest Family-Run Café Beat Gentrification

The first thing that hits you is the noise. To visit E Pellicci, the Italian café at 332 Bethnal Green Road, London E2, is to enter a dining room full of chattering gossip, shouting, bickering, shrieking laughter and raucous swearing. It’s tiny, and perpetually full — the café seats 33 people on seven Formica tables, with room for a further 10 outside — meaning you’re often thrust into conversation with the stranger opposite you. Conducting the chaos and skilfully weaving their way around the room are Nevio Pellicci Jr (41, chatty, exuberant), his sister Anna (45, maternal, sisterly and flirtatious, somehow all at once) and their cousin Salvatore “Tony” Zaccaria (65, stoic). All three are variously and simultaneously taking orders, collecting and delivering food from either the kitchen serving-hatch at the back of the café or the counter at the front, managing the expectant queue that snakes out into the street, improvising an ever-shifting seating plan, chatting animatedly with first-timers, and greeting their many regular customers with a combination of familial warmth and verbal abuse.

There are frequent birthday announcements, heralded by Nevio Jr or Anna clanging a spoon against the coffee machine before leading the entire room in a rendition of “Happy Birthday” and then, for some reason, invariably playing a snippet of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus” on the stereo. There are general announcements that can be about more or less anything. “Excuse me, everyone!” Nevio Jr shouts, “I’ve just discovered we have a very special guest here today… this lady is from west London!” A faux-reverential “Oooooh!” goes up from the assembled diners, as the lady from Fulham, a newcomer to Pellicci’s, cackles with laughter. Later, she leaves beaming, kissing Nevio Jr on the cheek and vowing to return. Ordering takes place at the table, or sometimes in the queue by the counter, or sometimes outside in the street. Payment is haphazard, cash-only and — in the case of the regular diners — frequently rounded down or forgotten about. Portion sizes are huge, and additional food is given out with wild abandon (“Oi, I’ve chucked in some chips so you can dip them in the lasagne sauce!” “Here, you’ve got to try some of mama’s bread pudding!”). It’s an uplifting, exhilarating, exhausting experience.

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E Pellicci can claim to be the oldest family-run café in London. It was in 1900 that Priamo Pellicci, his wife Elide and their son Dorino left the village of Roggio in Provincia di Lucca, Tuscany, and came to London, where Priamo took a job in a small café. When the owner, a fellow Tuscan, decided to return to Italy, Priamo bought the place. It was named E Pellicci, in honour of Elide, and initially sold cigarettes and sweets as well as food. “Probably just egg and chips back then, though,” says Anna. “We didn’t do none of that foreign rubbish until the Eighties!” Together, Priamo and Elide ran the café and had six more children; Dorino was followed by Peter, Olga, Terry, Joe, Nevio and Meri.

In 1931, Priamo died of tuberculosis, and Elide single-handedly raised the children while running the café herself, shaping it, more or less, into the business it is today. In 1946, she commissioned one of her regular customers, a local joiner named Achille Capocci, to do all the woodwork, paying him for a segment at a time, as she didn’t have the money to get it all done at once. The end result was a beautiful walnut-panelled interior with art deco marquetry and a plaque reading “EP” behind the counter. The café was Grade II-listed in 2005. “You can’t get nothing like this done no more,” says Nevio Jr, running his hand across the intricate woodwork. “There was a fire in the kitchen in 2000 and they had to redo a bit, look — it’s shit.”

Elide died in 1980 and her portrait, and another of Priamo, hang on either side of the kitchen serving hatch, overlooking the café. It was Nevio, born in 1925 in the room upstairs, who inherited the business. Courteous and immaculately turned out, he developed an easy rapport with his customers, who frequently became regulars. It helped that the food was good, too. In the kitchen was a woman named Maria, with a warm smile and a magical way with hand-cut chips. Born in 1940, she had moved from Tuscany to London in 1961 and started working at Pellicci’s, where she met Nevio. They fell in love, married and produced three children — Bruna (the eldest, who works in IT), Anna and Nevio Jr, who today work in the café alongside Tony.

“Oh, he was the perfect gentleman,” says Tony, of his uncle Nevio Sr. “That’s what everybody called him. He was fun to be with, he was… Nevio Pellicci.” Tony is the café’s second-longest serving employee, starting in 1970, aged 18. Unlike Anna and Nevio Jr, who have pure cockney accents that switch to Italian when describing the pasta dishes — “’Ello, we got a beautiful cannellllloni today, sweet’eart…” — Tony retains the accent of his hometown of Eboli, southern Italy, which he left to come and work at Pellicci’s. “Nevio, he was the best man in the business. I been so lucky to work under him. Everything I know, I learn from him. I’m not as good as him, though! Always he had a shirt, a tie with the pin, the pencil-thin moustache. He was a character. Everybody knew him for looking smart all the time. As an Italian, he had it in his blood. He had lovely suits made; always wanted to look like Rudolph Valentino.”

Nevio Sr died in 2008 following a battle with motor neurone disease. “He didn’t know until right near the end,” says Anna. “He was 82, so some stuff we thought was just down to, you know, being 82. But as soon as he got the diagnosis, that was it, really.”

Maria, now 77 and still boundlessly energetic, continues to oversee the kitchen, cooking daily at the café she has worked in for over 55 years. Each morning she prepares sauces — béchamel, tomato, bolognese — short-crust pastry, pies and her acclaimed chips. “We do the potatoes in the morning. It’s a big job, but we done it for so many years. I like to cut ’em by hand. We had a machine for a while but customers complained! We won an award, [London paper] Evening Standard or something, they come in and watch me cut the chips! Ha ha! Nowadays my hands aren’t all that, but years ago I was really fast at cutting chips.”

Like his dad, Nevio Jr met his wife while working at the café. Nicola works in textile design, and together they have two children; Elena, three, and Clara, 18 months. “Well, she says they’re mine, but you never know, do you!” grins Nevio Jr.

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At the corner table by the counter, two of the café’s longest-serving regular diners, Maureen Flanagan and Eric Hall, are eating lunch. Talk has turned to the Kray twins, with whom E Pellicci is inextricably linked.

“Ronnie and Reggie would come in here every morning for breakfast,” says Flanagan, “because Mrs Kray didn’t do breakfasts, she was too busy ironing all their shirts!” Flanagan first visited the café 50 years ago, as a guest of the Krays. “I’d met their brother Charlie in a City Road club when I was 20. He said, ‘What do you do?’ And I said, ‘I’m a hairdresser.’ He said, ‘Are you good?’ I said, ‘I’m marvellous!’” Charlie Kray arranged for Flanagan to cut his mother Violet’s hair, and Flanagan soon became part of the family’s inner circle. “I’d go over to their place on Vallance Road on Thursday afternoons, because if Vi went out to the salon everyone would be asking her for favours. ‘Oh, could the boys do this?’ ‘Could the twins sort that out?’”

Maureen had a long career as a model, known professionally as “Flanagan”, and in her twenties was reputed to be the most photographed woman in Britain. In the early Seventies, she became one of The Sun’s first Page 3 girls. “We got paid £12.50 an hour, which wasn’t bad. Just me and a photographer — and he wasn’t going to try anything, I’d murder him!” Thanks to a phone call from Ronnie she acquired an Equity card in remarkably short order, and appeared in TV shows including Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Benny Hill Show and a Christopher Lee film, Dracula AD 1972.

Flanagan remained close to the Krays their entire lives, visited them in prison after they were incarcerated for the murders of Jack “The Hat” McVitie and George Cornell, and turned down Reggie’s marriage proposals. “Three times, he asked me!” Flanagan laughs. “Each time in front of witnesses, too!” The night before Ronnie Kray’s funeral, Flanagan sat in Pellicci’s and was interviewed by ITV. “They said, ‘How will he be buried tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Like a king. He’ll have more cars than Winston Churchill’ — which turned out to be absolutely right. The whole of Bethnal Green Road stood still, they all came out of their shops and then the carriage stopped here, outside Pellicci’s. And the Pellicci family were outside with their flowers, to put ’em on. The dad stood there, all in his lovely suit and shirt and tie with his wreath. Total, total respect.”

“Of course, I knew ’em as well, bubula!” interjects Eric Hall. “And, you see, I’m the one who’s been coming here longest! But then I cheated, ’cos I came as a baby.” Born in 1947 on the Boundary Estate in Old Nichol Street, Hall first came to the café 70 years ago in his pram, surely making him the longest-standing customer. This afternoon, he holds court, sitting with his back to the wall so he can see the door (“I won’t say why, but it’s an old East End thing…”) and unleashing anecdotes laced with Yiddishisms (“Let me tell you, bubula, he was an old schmuck…”).

Hall has led an eclectic life. He made his name as the first of the big-shot football agents, representing players including Terry Venables, Dennis Wise and Robbie Savage. “I got into it by chance. I met some footballers in a bar, and I gave ’em some spiel: ‘I can’t be a football agent, I’m Jewish! You do free kicks, you should charge for them!’’’ Before that, he was in the music industry. “I left school with nothing, A-level schmay-level. I worked at Mills Music in Tin Pan Alley, Denmark Street. I was packing parcels. The other office tea boy was Reg Dwight, who went on to be Elton John. Over the road was David Jones — David Bowie.” Hall worked his way up from the post room, and ended up head of promotion at EMI. “I was big on expenses, I spent zillions. Know what Cliff Richard used to call me? Eric ‘I’ll send you a limo’ Hall. I had an artist get picked up from Pellicci’s, taken to Bethnal Green station. ‘I’ll send you a limo’. Bang.”

Hall worked with bands including the Sex Pistols and Queen, and tells me how the song “Killer Queen” was written about him: “Freddie fancied me! He was the queen and he couldn’t have me, and it was killing him! I had a perm in them days, like Marie Antoinette, and Moët & Chandon in my office. Listen to the lyrics, bubula, it’s all there.” (I ask Queen’s publicist if Brian May can confirm if the story is true. He responds: “I am afraid this is not something that Brian feels qualified to pass comment on.” Which isn’t a “no”…)

Over the years, all manner of notables have passed beneath E Pellicci’s primrose-yellow Vitrolite façade. Most have been documented in a photo with the smiling family, often along with a handwritten note. These have all been collected into one heaving tome which Tony, custodian of the café’s history, keeps behind the counter. A small sampling of celebrity guests includes Tom Hardy, who played both Kray twins in the 2015 film Legend; David Schwimmer; Idris Elba; Ronan Keating (“Best ham egg & chips, thanx guys”); Michael Gambon; Jarvis Cocker (“Twas delicious ta, xxx”); Ralph Fiennes; Su Pollard; Siobhan Fahey from Bananarama (“To Anna and Nev — love Pellicci’s, my favourite caff!”); Derren Brown; Nancy Dell’Olio; Ray Winstone; and John Everard, British ambassador to North Korea, who has kindly signed his photo “John Everard, British ambassador to North Korea”.

But part of the joy of E Pellicci is the range of real people. The café is always packed with a broad cross-section of all human life. There’s Paul Barnett, 58, and his mum Ellen, 85, who’ve been coming for 30 years, and these days sit outside because Ellen’s electric wheelchair is too large for the narrow doorway.

“We come here for the tea,” says Paul, “and all I get is abuse.” “What’s that, you cunt?” says Anna, right on cue, brandishing a free chicken dinner whipped up by the kitchen when someone realises it is Paul’s birthday.

There’s management consultant Bismah Ali, 22, and her group of twentysomething friends: Olivia Wasik, Antigone Pitta, India Brown and Karin Narita, all of whom met at nearby Queen Mary University and who eat together at the café every Saturday. “I’m hungover today,” says Karin, “so Anna’s given me a minestrone. And a Nurofen.”

There’s Kevin Rowland, lead singer of Dexys Midnight Runners, lean and dapper at 64. “I first came in the Eighties,” says Rowland, “and then I moved out of London for a bit. But I’m back now. I live in Hackney, and I come as often as I can. Tony gives me my regular order — a salad with broccoli and onion gravy.”

There’s lawyer Adam Robins, 26, and his girlfriend Kelly Whiting, 27, a baker and powerlifter. “We always come on Saturdays,” says Whiting. “One day I was sick but I told Adam to go on his own. They asked where I was, and sent Adam home with a plate of lasagne for me!” Having learned that Robins’ mum is a gifted gardener, Anna now regularly discusses gardening tips with her. “They’re talking a lot about beetroots,” says Robins.

A much-missed presence in the café is Rodney Archer, the eccentric and flamboyant East End aesthete dubbed “The King of Spitalfields”, who lived in a big, beautiful Georgian house on Fournier Street and collected Oscar Wilde memorabilia. “I come to Pellicci’s every Wednesday and Saturday,” Archer was quoted as saying. “On Wednesday, I am the gay mascot for the Repton Boxers and on Saturday we bet on the horses.”

“We was good friends,” says Nevio Jr. “His favouritest things was black men and Bollinger, so we’d have parties up at his. I’d bring a bunch of my mates and he’d supply the Champagne! But he died at 75. Had a mad heart attack.”

Pellicci’s is a place with a proliferation of nicknames. There’s “Jukebox Jimmy” the Scots cockney, known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Fifties and Sixties rock. There’s “Pedro” aka Peter Smith, 75, from Rochester, who looks and sounds like Michael Caine, claims to be a Mensa member with an IQ of 141, and who got Anna’s son Paolo a job in quantity surveying. There’s “Skinny”, aka John Vass, 52, a black-cab driver from Plumstead, who was introduced to the café 18 years ago while studying for The Knowledge alongside Melvyn Pamplin, 63, possibly E Pellicci’s third-longest regular customer (of 45 years).

And there are the self-explanatorily nicknamed “Meatballs Dave”, “Steak and Kidney” and “Norman the Jew”. “I’ve got a nickname for all this lot,” offers Anna amiably. “Look — there’s Fat Fred the Cunt!” A man reading a newspaper paper looks up. “Oi! Don’t call me fat!” He sips his tea, philosophically. “I am an ’orrible cunt, though.”

There’s “The Criminal”, the utterance of whose first name prompts sudden intakes of breath from surrounding tables, the smile to vanish from Nevio Jr’s face, and Anna to physically erase the name from my notepad. And The Criminal isn’t the only Pellicci’s customer to have pursued an alternative career path. Fred the Cunt, for instance, doesn’t profess to having a job. “What do I do? Nothing.” Nearby regulars snigger. “I’m unemployed, unemployable.” At this, he quietly produces a thick wad of crisp £50 notes from his back pocket. He’s holding at least £3,000. “Yeah, I’m skint, I need some money. Got any money for me?” Seconds later, the cash disappears back into his pocket and Fred strolls out into the street. It’s possible he’s a very good busker.

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Bethnal Green is changing. At the turn of the 20th century, when the Pellicci family arrived in London, the slum dwellings — once grand houses of the Huguenot silk weavers of Spitalfields — were being dismantled and the Boundary Estate, some of the world’s first council housing, was being built. Cockney market traders lived alongside Irish labourers and Jews working on Brick Lane. Communities ebbed and flowed throughout the century; the Jews drifted to north London, many cockneys moved further east to Essex and Kent, and the Bangladeshi community of Bethnal Green flourished. The building on the corner of Fournier Street and Brick Lane serves as a marker of the area’s waves of immigration. Built as a French Huguenot church in 1743, it became a Wesleyan chapel in 1819, a Jewish synagogue in 1898, and since 1976 has been a mosque, the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid.

Today gentrification, inevitably, has precipitated the most recent shift in the area’s character. What was once a place for cheap housing and waves of immigrant communities to settle, is being rapidly subsumed into central London. Bethnal Green is now prime real estate, with property prices divorced from the realities of local business. A newly built, two-bedroom flat in the area now averages £800,000. A terraced house can easily cost more than £1m. With a burgeoning population of young professionals, some of the grime and grit of the neighbourhood is being sluiced off; the pub across the road from E Pellicci, previously called Valiente — allegedly a “sports bar” that seemingly operated without a licence, in which everyone smoked indoors and people would swig spirits neat from the bottle — has been replaced with Coupette, a Calvados-centric cocktail bar offering “an eclectic menu inspired by French avant-garde cultural icons from the worlds of art, music, photography and dance”, run by Chris Moore, formerly head of the Beaufort Bar at The Savoy. Amid this shifting backdrop, E Pellicci, a living remnant of London’s old East End, is a constant. A vibrant place of warmth, human connection and deeply affectionate piss-taking.

“Why do I come here, bubula?” says Eric Hall, “Good food, good atmosphere, good staff and good people. There’s a lot of cafés — but this is a social club, and we’re all members.”

“You’ve got cabbies, models, villains and they all get along,” says Kevin Rowland. “But what’s most important is the love!”

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There aren’t many places left like E Pellicci. Through the continued hard work of the family, the ongoing patronage of their long-time customers and the protection of English Heritage, the café has, for now, preserved a moment in the mid-20th century that is starting to fade away. But the ceaseless pace of work is hard for the staff. Tony is first through the door, arriving at 5.20am each morning. “I’m 65, I don’t know how long I’m gonna go on for. This job is too hard for the new generation. My son is 33. He worked here a little while after school, but I knew it wasn’t for him. You’ve got to have a passion.”

The family’s seemingly inexhaustible supplies of cheerful backchat, banter and quips are draining, too. “It’s difficult, sometimes,” says Anna. “I had to get my head sorted. I’d be coming home to my husband and my little boy like this [she pulls a sad face], but that’s not right, ’cos they’re my number ones.”

Ultimately, it’s impossible to know what will happen to the café in the future, because Maria Pellicci will not be drawn on it. “Oh, I dunno! I don’t think about that, innit!” she laughs. Any plans of retiring? “No! Not retiring, because what am I gonna do indoors? I’ve been here so many years I couldn’t sit indoors. I keep going!” Are there any plans in place? “Nahhhh, nothing. I just go day by day! Ha ha! I’m not a person to think about long term!”

Tony is a little more forthcoming. “We hope it will stay in the family. It would be nice if one of the kids takes over. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. You get these big chains taking over everything. But we’ve been here a long time — we’re still going to be here a long time yet.”

It’s the end of the day — just after 4pm, when E Pellicci’s doors officially close (though those with charm and chutzpah might succeed in sneaking in later) — and Nevio Jr’s wife Nicola enters with their daughters. Anna sees them first, and shouts a delighted greeting across the room. Little Clara is immediately passed up onto the kitchen counter for inspection by the besotted Maria. Tony crouches down, grinning, and greets Elena with a wave of his huge hand.

A blue marigold glove has been blown up into a makeshift balloon for the girls to play with. Elena sits at the table next to the serving hatch, and draws on it happily with black marker pen. Nevio Jr clangs on the coffee machine and makes an announcement. “Something extra special today — it’s Elena’s birthday!” The café cheers in unison, and launches into a rendition of “Happy Birthday”. Elena beams a delighted, toothy smile.

Anna walks past. “It’s not really her birthday,” she mutters, grinning, “we do that every fucking week.”

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In the changing rooms at the New Docklands Steam Baths, a man I’ve just met is cracking my neck and spine. “Relax…no, properly relax,” says Lou, a heavy-set man of 69 with a faded tattoo of a mermaid on his forearm. CRACK. My neck jolts to the left, and then the right. I feel a chiropractic release. “That’s called the bear hug! I could see from how you moved your shoulder that you needed that. Right, I’m off, but I’ll see you around - I come here Sundays and Thursdays!” It’s a Tuesday evening. “Enjoy the schmeiss!”

*****

The last of East London’s traditional steam baths is located in a squat, flat-roofed unit in a grey, unlovely industrial estate on the edge of Canning Town. It is attended by what is surely a uniquely eclectic cross-section of society. Old East End cockneys. Young Russians, Lithuanians and Latvians. Hassidic Jews from Stamford Hill. Muslim students. Second generation West Indians. Boxers, opera singers, market traders, high court judges, nurses, night club owners, electricians, and at least one bank robber. It is predominantly – although not exclusively – a male space (there are mixed-gender sessions twice a week, and women-only sessions on Wednesdays). The nudity is relaxed and ubiquitous, and the fraternal, homosocial chatter throughout the rooms of the bathhouse is lively, unguarded, and uncensored.

I find the experience overwhelming at first - travelling from the changing rooms, through the quiet upstairs café, and down into the raucous, chattering bath house. But, over repeated visits, I begin to make sense of it. There are saunas of varying heats, from lukewarm to close to unbearable, where massages are given. There is the dense smog of the steam room, in which soapy raffia schmeissing mops (‘besoms’) are swung overhead and slapped downwards, cleansing and exfoliating the bodies of prone schmeiss-ees. There is the dark molten air of the Banya, whipped ever hotter by leafy venik branches wielded by Russians in pixie caps, seemingly impervious to the heat. Outside, there is the icy plunge pool. All treatmants are administered free of charge, by the bathhouse regulars, to one another. People stay for hours, shvitzing (sweating), showering, submerging themselves in the icy water, and then doing it all again.

“Your body ain’t fully clean unless you’ve been to the baths!” says retired cabbie Sammy Soraf, 91, still a Tuesday morning regular, who claims a Zelig-like series of associations across the 20^th century, including dealings with the Krays, George Best, and Frank Sinatra. “There’s something ancient about a place like this,” says David Benson, 58, an actor, and creator of a series of one-man shows including an acclaimed portrayal of Kenneth Williams. “In the first place, it’s a ritual,” says Mark Lazarus, 81, a former professional football player for QPR who now runs a removals company in Romford. An East End Jew and one of 13 siblings (including Lew and Harry, both boxers, and Jojo, about whose colourful career no-one will speak on the record), Lazarus is former chairman of the Steam Baths - as the building’s current manager, Wayne Gruba, 65, explains to me. Gruba, who is bald, ursine and softly spoken, has run the New Docklands since 2000, and I find him in the café, reclining in swimshorts on a chair.

“When they shut the old East Ham Town Hall baths in the early Nineties it was still very busy”, explains Gruba, “but only about 30 people would pay legit. There was a back door, and a bloke who worked there opened it - about 180 people would come the back way.” Eventually the council closed the premises, and awarded the contract to collect the scrap to an East Ham customer - Dave Ames, a man the New Docklands regulars unanimously refer to as Pikey Dave. “Well Pikey Dave, he went and collected the boiler, the pipe works, the seating, the hooks,” says Gruba. “And a group of us regulars, we found this disused building [in Canning Town], broke in, and changed the locks. And we set it up! It was makeshift, but we had the steam.”

The regulars all invested some money in this first iteration of ‘Pikey Dave’s steam club’, which opened in 1995, with Mark Lazarus named chairman. “Our place was lively,” says Gruba, “and it was full of East Enders, who loved an ‘earner’. So there’d be all sorts of deals; stolen towels, razor blades, shampoo…” Ames couldn’t read or write, however, and his wife June handled the finances - but following her death in 1998, two years of disastrous financial mismanagement followed, with money being stolen by a series of duty managers. In 2000, following an emergency meeting, Mark Lazarus handed the reins, and the debt, to Gruba (whose background is in facilities management) on the proviso that he never let the baths shut. Gruba, a man who appears to take his responsibilities seriously, set about writing off the debts, and, in 2003, reorganised the New Docklands as a charitable trust.

“We’ve realised there’s a benefit to both schmeiss and venick, so our next step is to make that a part of coming here; if we could offer them as treatments, it would be a more well-rounded experience.” Gruba is constantly mindful of the need to expand the building’s appeal. When Eastern European customers started coming in 2009, he added the venik branches to the banya. He’s started teaching a masterclass on schmeissing, introducing younger generations to the rejuvenating pleasures of the soapy mop. “And we’re gonna get on social media, too…” But well as modernising, Gruba is tasked with preserving the heritage of the place, and managing the bickering, swearing old guard, with all their tall tales and eccentricities. “So there’s Lou, for instance, who has this thing where he likes clicking people’s backs.” I mention that I’ve met Lou. Gruba winces. “I keep telling him he shouldn’t be doing osteopathy, he’s a crane driver.” He shrugs. “But so far, touch wood, no-one’s been badly hurt.”

****

In my visits to the New Docklands Steam Baths, I’ve become fascinated by the interplay between the regulars. It’s a place of coarseness and vulgarity - of cackling, abuse, wilfully offensive swearing - but also of great tenderness. In a bath house with almost no staff - it’s just Gruba, really, with another person at the till and a café worker cooking food - there is a unique micro-economy of favours and kindness; massages are given freely, but with the expectation of one in return, at some point down the line. ’You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ has never been interpreted more literally.

Everything about the experience is intense - the temperatures, the sensations, and the immediacy of human contact; without phones, or newspapers, people simply talk to one another. It’s odd, in the modern world, and especially in London, to be in an environment where people are genuinely relaxed, and open to conversation. Most co-working spaces or members’ clubs, ostensibly spaces for mingling, and theoretically conducive to impromptu deals being struck and creative sparks flying, in fact simply create little bubble worlds; hundreds of hermetically sealed ecosystems, comprised of flickering screens and headphones. At the baths, in amongst the shouting and the bullshitting, I am immediately and unconditionally welcomed by everyone I speak to. One evening in the café I get talking to Ben, 33, and Isaac, 35, two Stamford Hill Hassidim, who immediately offer me a glass of their vegetable juice as Ben shares his memories of visiting the baths with his father from the age of 15. Upon hearing that I’ve not yet been schmeissed today, Isaac heads back downstairs with me, sources a besom (from Syed Rahman, 24, a young Muslim student of Building Surveying at Westminster University, and one of Gruba’s schmeissing disciples), and selflessly scrubs my back - the third treatment he’s administered that day. And on my very first visit, David Benson the actor gives me a tour of the baths and warmly introduces me to everyone he passes, animatedly discussing his love for the New Docklands - “I escape from everything, it’s another world” - but ending on a note of particular distain for the councils who have made the place a necessity. “I always say that they’re like the Taliban - they shut everything down.”

London was once home to an array of municipal baths, where dockers would sluice off after a day’s work. Mile End. Hackney. Barkingside. York Hall. Ironmonger Row. Crisp Street. East Ham. All are now gone. “What you’ve got to remember,” says Malcolm Lanceman, 71, “is that people then just did not have bathrooms!” Malcolm, a retired finance professional, is part of the old guard - he was an original shareholder in Pikey Dave’s baths, before Gruba took over - and he still comes regularly, driving down from Harpenden to meet with a regular group including ‘Turkish Jock’, 68, a retired electrician from East London, and ‘Yorkie’, 76, a builder originally from Pontefract.

Each week they have a steam, then go for a curry, and share memories of regulars who have died - inhabitants of a London that’s fading away. Of Titch, the Jewish rag ’n’ bone man who taught Malcolm how to schmeiss, and who refused to go to war due to his strident socialist beliefs. Of Solly, who was released from prison on a Friday and somehow opened a pub on the Monday. Of Cyril, the immaculately-dressed taxi driver, who always arrived wearing a flawless suit and trilby. Of the beloved Bobby Lazarus, another of Mark’s brothers, whose life is commemorated by a gold plaque on the café wall, depicting his Rolls Royce, a winning hand of cards (his favourite pastime), and accompanied by a poem;

You always had a smile to share,
A laugh, a joke, time to care,
You left a place no one can fill,
We miss you Bob and always will,
Always in our hearts,
From your friends at the baths.
- Bobby Lazarus (1937 - 2002)

The glossy, glassy, world of modern London is creeping across the capital. The facilities on offer at the New Docklands have been repackaged and commodified elsewhere, for a very different market. Porchester Hall in Bayswater, once the only other equivalent space in the city, now charges £31 for two and a half hours’ entry. (“And there’s no canteen, no schmeissing, no venik, and you’re not allowed to shave,” says Gruba.) The Banya No. 1, in Hoxton, charges £60 for three hours (£75 at peak time). And at the Russian Bathhouse in Belgravia, the Standard treatment costs £90. The New Docklands Steam Baths costs £16 for a full day’s entry1. “It’s a dying trade, as it happens,” says Mark Lazarus. “We’re just not getting the youngsters.” But Gruba is gamely planning for the baths’ future - including its eventual move to a new, as-yet-unknown premises, once Newham Council get round to doing some inevitable ‘placemaking’ on the industrial wilderness where the baths currently stand. But for as long as Gruba can keep the the boiler running, a small but devoted following remains.

“Afterwards, you feel sort of reborn,” says Isaac, over vegetable juice. “There’s something sacred about it” says Syed Rahman, in the dark of the banya. “Really”, says David Benson, as we re-enter the sauna, “the only sad thing is putting your clothes on, and going back out into the world.”

The New Docklands Steam Baths (updated and now actually quite slick) website is here.

Originally published in Esquire magazine.